Teach42

Taking a quick break before the evenings activites but figured I’d check in with a quick NECC report. I spent most of the day in the vendor area, and for the most part it was exactly what you’d expect. Tons of blinking stuff and a mad scramble to get some free schwag.

A few highlights though:

Loved Microsoft’s booth. Love seats, lavalamps, tie dye t-shirts. The exact opposite you’d expect from Microsoft. Maybe they’re taking those Apple commercials personally. Seriously though, it definitely changed the image I have for Microsoft. It was a pretty bold move, but kudos to them for making it. From what I could see, they pulled it off.

I don’t know what the heck was going on at Best Buy, but there was a massive line over there. They were giving way giant oversized shopping bags that definitely caught your eye. Everybody seemed to have them. Or perhaps only 10 people had them, but they were so big that you couldn’t see anything else in the entire area except for the massive bag. Anybody know what they were giving away over there?

CDWG is doing their “Find your match” game again. I’m a big fan of that one, because it really brings people together. It forces people to start talking to people they might never meet otherwise, and helps people connect with each other. Great conversation starter, and gives you a reason to continually scan the crowd (besides just checking out what t-shirts and blinking things people are wearing).

Otherwise, most of the booths seemed pretty par for course. You can read all about the Discovery booth on the DEN blogs of course.

Anybody have any highlights of the booth area that they want to share? Who were the winners and losers so far?

Technorati tags: NECC, NECC06,

Alright, this one is going to be short. I’m at Warlick’s podcasting workshop. It should get started any minute now, but they seem to be experiencing network issues. Of course, the case could be made that the entire conference has been experiencing network issues due to the lack of WiFi available during workshops, but I think that point has already been made.

It’s noon right now. My flight leaves at 2:40. I’m going to be meeting my colleagues by the taxi stand in 30-45 minutes, so I’m definitely going to have leave early. Just found out about a new podcast at Drexel-coas-elearning.blogspot.com. I’ll have to check that one out later.

It’s too bad, I’ve really been looking forward to this one and instead of being able to relax and enjoy it, my heart is beating frantically from racing across the convention center and I’m staring at the clock so I don’t lose track of time.

I wasn’t sure that Dave was going to be doing during the session, but it really looks like Podcasting 101. The subtitle is “A teacher’s guide to capturing and creating podcasts.” Sounds like it just might be something real practical, which would be pretty darn impressive if it is. Doing a practical Blogging 101 in one hour is pretty challenging, a practical Podcasting 101 would be a royal pain.

I’m really glad he’s starting off by saying that there’s nothing about podcasting that is specific to Apple or to the Macintosh. Podcastiing really has very little to do with the iPod, unless you talk about the iPod as a general term representing all MP3 players (like when someone ‘Tivos’ a show or ‘Xeroxs’ a piece of paper.

He’s showing people where they can get the online handouts. I do like the fact that Dave has all of his handouts available to people from every presentation he’s done since 1996.

If you add the words podcast, session, and warlick, your blog post will automatically be added to the online handouts. I didn’t know you could do that through a Wiki. So I guess these notes are going to be part of the online materials. Maybe I should adjust my writing style accordingly… Or maybe not!

He’s showing a list of Podcast Directories and it fascinates me that he doesn’t have EPNweb.org listed first. His directory is an incredible resource for educators. He is describing it in depth though. I would have had it listed first, underlined it and bolded it. Podcast Alley could have been listed second and the rest of them could have been written in 8 point font. Alright, maybe I’m a little biased. Maybe I’m a lot biased.

He has a bunch of educational podcasts listed on this next slide, and he has mine listed first. Of course, the name of it has a typo in it (it’s listed as Teacher42 instead of Teach42) but at least the url is right. He has a pretty good sampling listed though including One Big Head, Room 208, Ed-Tech Musician, Connect Learning, and a few others.

Now we’re into RSS. The transformation from a blog, to XML file, to aggregator/podcatcher. This is the most dangerous part of these sorts of presentations. The words RSS, XML and aggregator confuse the heck out of people. That’s the single best thing about iTunes 4.9. If you use iTunes, you don’t need to ever think about RSS, XML, or feeds url’s. I’ve heard that Adam Curry’s primary plea at Nomdex was for developers to create a way to subscribe to blogs with a single click. The importance of that cannot be overstated.

Wow, there’s a bunch of people with laptops in the room and there always are. However, someone in the row behind me has a palm pilot docked into a keyboard and is typing notes that way. First time I’ve seen someone doing that at NECC! Very cool.

Someone just brought up iTunes 4.9. Warlick just blew my mind. He said that you can just drag an XML chicklet into iTunes and it will subscribe to the feed that way. I had no idea that you could do that! I have to try that one out! Too bad I don’t have wifi… Grrrr…

Dave is unable to connect to the internet as well. This is the first session I’ve seen where a presenter was unable to connect. Really too bad that it’s the podcasting session, and not something like Inspiration.

Someone mentioned NECC”s podcast and that she subscribed to it through the iTunes store. Dave said, “You mean Apple’s podcast?” Up until a half hour ago, I thought the NECC feed was Apple’s podcast as well. Turns out we’re horribly wrong! But more on that one later, it deserves a whole blog entry to itself.

He’s showing off the editing characteristics of Audacity. Personally, I wouldn’t go there. I don’t think most of the teachers in here are going to be interested in audio editing at this point. However, I should really pay attention here because I don’t know how to work the program very well at all. I should stop being critical and pay closer attention! My bad, apperantly I don’t understand the audience like Dave does. They’re loving this big time.

Tick tock tick tock. I hate having to stare at the clock. He’s playing a bit of Room 208, which is really a fun show. I’m definitely going to be using some of it as a model for what I’ll be doing next year.

He’s showing what you need to produce a podcast. He’s showing some $60 microphones, the Griffin iMic, a mixer, and so on. Now he’s showing the iPod with a Griffin iTalk. I really hope he also mentions that you can even use the built in microphone on your computer as well.

Here’s another reason why Dave is a great presenter. He’s trying to show off the iPod with the iTalk, which is way too small for someone at the back of the room to see. Instead, he hooks up his iSight, sits down in front of it and shows it to the iSight which is then shown through the projector in a much larger size. Neat, fun and effective.

Back to the iPod, he’s going through the process of how it syncs up with iTunes and what you do from there. He’s not going to say anything about using the built in mic on the laptop. I’ll have to let him know. I always like pointing out that people do NOT need to invest any dollars into this if they don’t want to. Eventually they’ll probably want to, but that shouldn’t be a barrier.

Dave is showing the html code for how you link to a file, “My podcast” I suppose you do need to show that, but most people gloss over at the first mention of code.

Well, the laptop died on me at that point so I took that as a sign that it was time to race off to the airport.

And for those of you that were concerned, no I would have made my flight even if it hadn’t been delayed for three hours.

Panel discussion. I recognize Will Richardson and Anne Davis is talking via Skype, but I don’t recognize the other three people

Anne is starting off. She’s saying that blogging has built learning communities like never before. With students, they spent a lot of time talkinga bout weblogs, what they were and what were the key components of them before giving her students their own. She didn’t start off with comments on, she started slow and then added things in gradually.

Students would write about current events, their own ideas, and and making connections between those things and their classwork. At some point, Will’s journalism students mentored Anne’s students.

Weblogs make students feel like they have some control over what they’re doing in class. It’s giving them a choice. They really liked having a choice about what they were writing, within certain grounds. They liked voicing those opinions, and the teacher helped show them how to make those opinions count. Best to start small and keep the administration informed. She really likes the idea that they work together. She writes, they write, they collaborate as a team. You should really think about what you want to accomplish and have a plan, don’t just ‘start blogging’. She uses Manilla and has all comments made on any weblog emailed to her. You also need to build in time for reflection. Teachers should help students reflect upon their work, help to identify strengths and weaknesses. The process is more important than the final product. She says that she has learned more from weblogs than from any other inservice she’s ever had.

She’s had inappropriate comments this year for the first time, and only a few. She thinks it’s important to teach students to just delete them and move along. We need to help students learn to deal with them.

Will has taken the stage now. He has 600 weblogs running at his school right now. They have around 350 student blogs as well. It’s not just a writing tool. He has phys-ed teachers, art teachers, science teachers all using them as well. The power in this comes from the ability to publish and for students to share their work with a larger audience. They’re contributing to the greater body of knowledge that’s out there. He points out that in many places, blogs are starting to get a bad name.

Blogs are more than just a diary, it’s a writing and publishing tool. You really force students to think in ways that they don’t do on paper. Someone is asking whether they have an editorial process before they go live (student weblogs). His blogs are public to the world, but the general world cannot comment on them. Comments are just available to kids in the class (and teachers I assume).

Someone is up there doing his spiel, but I don’t know who it is! They probably did their introductions at the beginning, but I got here five minutes late.

Tom Hoffman is up there now. He’s giving a brief introduction of School Tool and talking about how he’s trying to bridge the gap between hackers and teachers to create some interesting Open Source software. He started reading technical blogs before educational blogs. In the technology field, many of the elite ‘experts’ are blogging every single day. That isn’t happening quite yet in education. We’re getting there, but we’re still a ways off.

Tim Lauer is up there now. I’ve never met him before, so it’s nice to finally put a face to the name. At Lewis Elementary, they use blogs for their main school web page as well as school bulletins. They actually discuss issues through comments on the staff blog. For the record, I think Lewis Elementary is probably the best elementary school web site in the country right now. It is dynamic and truly breaths. It gives parents a reason to go visit it each and every day (or even better, a reason to subscribe to it). Teachers write a paragraph just about every day and it gets aggregated into one main news page. Parents have a single place to find out all the information that they might want to know, across grade levels.

Wikis, fourth and fifth grade teachers used instiki. Runs on a laptop but accessible from anywhere in the building. The kids go to the computer lab, edit their work (they each have their own page on the wiki for each assignment), and then the teacher can take that laptop home to grade, edit, comment on work.

Aaahhh…. He’s talking about the importance of syndication. How it can take something rather unwieldy, like checking up on 30 blogs daily, and make it a simple task.

Lots of question and answer at this point and since I’ve been pretty interested in the conversation, I’ve forgotten to type up notes! We’ve been bouncing around between how you use blogs in math, how you deal with security issues, and some of the finer aspects of wikis.

A question has come up about threaded discussion versus blogs. Tom reminds everyone that if you like your discussion board, you should keep it. Blogs are not the solution to every problem. Blogs create a body of work, something you have ownership of like a portfolio. There’s no way to pull together all of your various posts on discussion boards all over the web.

Why aren’t there more women blogging? There’s a large body of women that are blogging and are very popular. Will mentions that of the 80 or so educators in his blogroll, only 10 of them are women. There are a lot of women who blog about what’s going on in their classroom, but not as many talking philosophy, educational practice and so on.

You know what, I think they may be right. I’m thinking about my own blogroll, and I think it’s mostly men. There are definitely some very notable women, but the majority are men. Interesting. Will points out that there are an incredible number of girls on Live Journal, Xanga and other sites like that who are blogging.

This is turning into quite an interesting discussion. A gender divide in the blogosphere… Sounds like an interesting research topic.

Time to move along. Interesting discussion. Got some nuggets that probably warrant their own blog entries or podcasts. Great way to start the final day.